Why Microsoft Word is Superior to LaTeX for Most STEM Students
This lesson explains how to install and use LaTeX Typeset software on a MacBook while simultaneously arguing why Microsoft Word is usually the better long-term professional tool for STEM majors.
The lesson begins by showing students how to install LaTeX software through MacTeX and how to open the TeXShop application.
Students are instructed to search for:
MacTeX Download
and install the software package that includes TeXShop.
Basic LaTeX Structure
The lesson explains that LaTeX documents require package structures and formatting commands before equations can properly compile.
A simple integral example is compared between Microsoft Word and LaTeX.
In LaTeX, equations are often surrounded by dollar signs and use commands such as:
The lesson demonstrates how Microsoft Word’s equation editor already interprets most of this syntax automatically.
Microsoft Word vs LaTeX
A major point of the lesson is that Microsoft Word already supports LaTeX-style mathematical syntax inside its equation editor.
Example:
can often be typed directly into Microsoft Word and parsed automatically.
The lesson argues that many STEM students spend years learning advanced LaTeX workflows while neglecting practical software tools that employers actually expect them to know.
Why Microsoft Office Skills Matter
The lesson strongly emphasizes that job applications commonly request:
- 3 to 5 years of Microsoft Office experience.
- Professional document formatting skills.
- Communication and presentation ability.
- Spreadsheet and reporting experience.
- Professional technical writing.
The argument presented is that students can gain these skills naturally by completing homework assignments and technical projects directly inside Microsoft Word instead of relying exclusively on LaTeX.
Formatting Books and Technical Documents
The lesson discusses the complexity of formatting professional books using LaTeX packages.
Students are shown how:
- Margins must be manually configured.
- Spine spacing must be adjusted.
- Packages must be loaded correctly.
- Document parsing can easily fail.
- Formatting large books becomes time consuming.
The lesson contrasts this with Microsoft Word workflows where printing margins, page sizes, and formatting can often be completed visually within seconds.
Equation Example
The lesson demonstrates how mathematical expressions appear in both systems.
Students are encouraged to understand that the underlying mathematical notation is often nearly identical between Word and LaTeX systems.
Criticism of Academic Workflows
The lesson criticizes the tendency for some university environments to force students into highly specialized software workflows without considering workforce relevance.
The discussion repeatedly emphasizes:
- Professional communication.
- Resume building.
- Practical office software experience.
- Efficiency.
- Formatting quality.
- Real-world job preparation.
The lesson also discusses how many students rely heavily on AI systems, online solution videos, or passive learning rather than developing professional communication and document production skills.
The Bigger Picture
The broader argument presented is that mathematics and physics students should focus not only on solving equations but also on building practical technical communication skills that employers value.
According to the lesson, being able to:
- Create professional reports.
- Format technical documents.
- Communicate clearly.
- Use office software efficiently.
- Present mathematical ideas professionally.
is often more valuable in industry than mastering highly specialized document markup systems.
Final Thoughts
The lesson concludes that LaTeX certainly has legitimate uses in publishing, advanced formatting, and academic typesetting, but argues that most undergraduate STEM majors would benefit far more from mastering Microsoft Word, technical writing, communication, and practical workplace software tools first.
Original Transcript
All right, kids. I’m going to show you how to find and set up my Latte Latte uh for MacBook. So, you just go you just go for Latte to Mac for download and go to this Mac Tech site here and go to the Mac Tech download. It’s free. This is Latte using the type set. It’s going to be in your applications. You’re going to scroll down and you’re going to see a few different icons here. Tech live table driver. Da da da. What you want is the tech shop. Okay. And if you want to type in latte, uh, what I’m I’ll show you how to how to do it here. Let’s just let’s just take a snippet of equation from one of my pieces of work. I don’t use latte anymore. I stopped using it years ago. I’m an expert in it. I know how to use it, but it’s a waste of time. No job ever wants to see it on your application. They don’t care. Nobody uses it to communicate. Uh, it takes 10 times longer to use. This was typed in Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word looks better. It works easier. You can make latte look awesome if you are a copyright editor and have an education in using latte software. That’s not science. Okay, th this all these things here, these arrows coming here, the structure, the color of this, the columns, all of these things that that’s why you would want to use latte. If you’re typing a book like that, if you’re just delivering a message mathematically like this, it’s a waste of time. It’s not a skill. It doesn’t help you. You do need to have 3 to five years of experience using Microsoft Office tools on your resume. So, when you’re in college, it’s a perfect opportunity to do your homework with Microsoft Word to get the necessary years of experience that you need to to um to write this stuff. Let me I already got So, I’ve got I’ve got um I’ve got I’ve asked Chat GBT to write this with the appropriate packages to parse it. Okay. So, what you guys need when you’re starting off when you’re doing Latte, you need to have this beginning document thing in there. I would highly recommend that you show your professor all the job applications that you’re going to be applying for and tell them that they want us to have three to five years of using Microsoft Office tools, not Latte software. Why are you having us do this? It’s not something that we’re ever going to use in the workforce. Uh, also this is type set up here. Type set, not type ST. Type ST is a third party knockoff. It’s not what you would want to use. Books like this are written in this software. Okay. There’s a there’s a purpose and a place for these things. I’m just going to take this code. that I already copied here. Okay. So, I I just I’m having it retype this code um that I typed in Microsoft Word. I’m just going to put it in here. What you need to do is you need to get these packages here in order in order for you to start typing in latte code, which in Microsoft Office, it’s almost identical. The code that you type is nearly identical. I’ll show you. In Microsoft Word, if you wanted to type integral um a integral x= a to x= b uh f ofx dx. If you wanted to write that in latte, you would type integral x= a. You would use curly brace instead of smooth brace. You do backslashes like this. It’s sometimes for spacing like that. And so this this is Microsoft Word and this is latte. Okay. So in Microsoft Word you would do integral x= a to x= b and uh make sure you hit the keys. My keys are sticking. I need to clean them. x= b. You hit space then f ofx. Then you hit the right arrow to get out of that. In this you would just type it like this. And that would that would autoparse it. And you would use something like dollar signs to do it. Now, so I’ll show you show you what that looks like here. So, here’s the uh here’s the dollar signs one I just did right here. And this this is this is typed up in latte code. Look, kids, if you want to waste years of your life learning how to type in a useless software that you’ll never use in the real world that does nothing to help your resume and wastes time, you’re becoming exactly what no employer wants working for them. somebody that they’re going to pay to do a job that takes 10 times less work to do for somebody else to do it. Like you it’s just a waste of time. This is not a computer programming language. It is it’s nothing. It does nothing for you. It’s a waste of time. Anybody that tells you it’s superior just doesn’t know how to use Microsoft Word. It’s the same thing. This is latte. Look in the equation editor. It says right here it’s latte. Look, it goes to the latte code. Okay. Problem is if you click that latte code, it unparses it. Now you got to go back in there and reparsse it all. And that will that that’s that is um there’s little tricks and things in in Microsoft Word that you have to learn, but essentially this is how you type in latte. This is how you type into Microsoft Word. It’s the same kind of software. You just got to know how to use it. If you want to format a book for print like this book is formatted, you’re going to have to do a whole lot of crazy um packages and coding and stuff. it. It takes me two seconds to format a book for professional publication in Microsoft Word and make it look awesome. If you don’t think this doesn’t look beautiful and awesome, I don’t know what you’re smoking. Okay, I showed you guys I showed you guys what it looks like from Harvard University in Berkeley, professors that use latte, it looks like a child wrote it. These are PhDs, okay? And it looks like a child wrote these documents. The margins are all messed up. The font’s all weird. It’s all squished together. You know why? because they don’t know how to use latex software. They just know how to type equations in it. They don’t actually know how to use it. I’ll go let’s just type in uh I’ll show you guys uh uh latte uh not latte. Let’s just do calculus integral Berkeley PDF. I type that in. I should get a I should get a latte type document usually u depending on if I let me do integral fundamental theorems. There’s usually some PDF that will pop up in latte from one of these. So, this is handwritten. I mean, the fact that somebody at this level of education is writing by hand like this, they should be embarrassed. It’s ridiculous. That’s not what you’re going to do in the workforce. So, here’s a latte document. Okay. So, look at look at the text. Look at the font. Look at the margins. The margins are all messed up. It’s the margins are not done correctly. The font the font’s all squished together. It’s not I mean it there is it it depends on how you’re formatting it and everything but it doesn’t really look it doesn’t really look that good and compared to something like this. This is similar but there’s a little bit better spacing. Maybe not entirely but notice how the margins on here are all they’re all out of whack in comparison to the margins on this one. It’s but they they formatted it for a book to have a spine here. You can see that they flip they flip-flopped it so that you can have a spine. And there’s thicker here and thicker here, but they’re not the correct margins. And to get that to be formatted and to type this to type that in the type set software, my god, I’ve done it before. It’s a nightmare. I don’t know why anybody would want to do it or defend it. If you defend it, I just if somebody comes to me and tries to defend that latte type set software is superior to Microsoft Word. I just look at them and I immediately think they are complete idiot. I have no respect for them because it tells me they don’t know how to use Word and they’re too lazy to figure it out. So, they’re just going to be egotistical and say, “I know I am, but what are you?” I know you are, but what am I?
And to me, it’s pathetic. Okay. So, this is typed up nice, beautiful, elegant. It’s typed up in the appropriate margins for printing. It take me about two seconds to do this in a Microsoft Word document. If I wanted to type this entire thing in Latte, I’d be here for hours and hours and you wouldn’t be able to see the code parsing as I type it. I would not be able to do this live. And a lot of you guys, you argue and argue and argue and then you watch me type this live and you all say the same thing. Okay, I see why you’re using that and not latte. It makes sense. And then it’s like, and what I don’t understand what you’re arguing about. I’m telling you, if you spend your entire college education using Latte Typeset software, you’re not going to get an you’re not going to get an interview anywhere. They’re they’re going to be like, what are you skilled at? Watching people on Khan Academy using Chat Gvt like a consumer and typing in latte software. like what what else do you want in a in a uh professional student that cheated their way through college? They’re like, “Uh yeah, we need people that know how to use Microsoft Office tools cuz that’s what everybody in the planet uses and that’s how we communicate to each other and it’s faster and it looks better and it’s smoother and it’s neater and it’s nicer.” And you’re like, “Uh-uh, I know everything. I went to college to study something that nobody else wants to study. That makes me write about everything.” Do you understand why I talk like this? It’s because I’m mimicking you guys. This is how people interpret your attitude. When you’re constantly disagreeing, you don’t know how to use anything. You don’t know how to do anything. You don’t research anything. You just blurt out nonsense and you cheat with Khan Academy and chat GBT all day. People just look at you like you’re a [ __ ] and you think you’re smart and you make yourself look stupider by continuing on being an idiot. I meet people like this all the time in person, online. It’s ridiculous. I do everything I can to try to help you. And you just you’re just determined to destroy your future because you think you’re right when you’re wrong about everything. So, here’s a here’s a here’s a typo. Those of you who are on the research position for Plum Academy, right? Here’s a typo. This uh this is a this is an object would not imply an equation. This should be this should be a connected there. This should be something equal to something to use this symbol here. That’s a that’s a typo you might point out. But anyways, if you guys are hellbent, determined to use latex software and ruin your future and waste your time, then go ahead and do it, okay? Chat GBT will show you how to get the packages and the codes, wherever that was. I just had that. Chat GBT will show you how to get these packages easy enough. Or you can search the internet. Waste your time, waste company dollars, waste your investment in your education. If you’re a professor assigning this garbage, my god, dude, you are a professional student. Stop trying to help kids get a job. Professors went to college. They never left. They are not the people you want to look to for advice on getting a job. If you don’t, if you look at me and you’re like one of these stupid ass kids are like, “He doesn’t even have any published. He doesn’t even have a PhD.” Dude, I’m not trying to help anybody get into grad school here, okay? 99% of you are going to graduate with an undergraduate degree and get a job. And 99% of you are not qualified to even get an interview when you graduate. I’m helping you guys get to that point. If you’re a pompous, arrogant little twerp, you need to leave this channel. I am so sick and tired of you spoiled little brats. This is not a channel for spoiled kids that get to buy their way into a career in college. This is a channel for people that come from either poverty, poverty, or realize that their parents destroyed their future by spoiling them and they want a reality check. You whiny, complaining, pathetic little worms need to leave this channel. Go use Typeset software. Go cheat with Khan Academy and AI. Enjoy driving for Uber when you graduate. Have a nice day.